Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

Re:Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube by brianpgordon on Friday January 25, 2019 @02:52PM (#19001812)

What do you want them to do? I'm an adult who uses YouTube and I don't want sanitized kid-friendly recommendations just so that you can protect your son's eyes from cartoon violence. In fact, several of the creators I like have been pinched hard by changes to the All-Powerful Algorithm which seem to be deliberately de-emphasizing anything that could be remotely considered offensive, and it's not fair to them at all.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube by mactrey on Friday January 25, 2019 @03:03PM (#19001950)

There should be a "parental controls" toggle.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube by mcrittenden on Friday January 25, 2019 @07:34PM (#19003916)

YouTube Kids is a separate app. Does that not suffice?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube by sincerely on Friday January 25, 2019 @09:16PM (#19004331)

No, YouTube Kids has the same problem. Content on it isn't really vetted in any way.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube by gundmc on Saturday January 26, 2019 @12:43AM (#19004966)

Have you used YouTube Kids recently? You can set it to "Approved Only Mode" which only allows kids to view human-vetted videos.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube by sincerely on Wednesday January 30, 2019 @12:16AM (#19032886)

That's good to hear!

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube by intertextuality on Friday January 25, 2019 @11:49PM (#19004826)

Employ human curated collections, no algorithms. There is simply no other way that guaranteed kid-friendly content will exist in a space. Otherwise people will game the algorithms and you get Elsa-gate.

I’ve talked about this before, but if you have kids, the only surefire solution is curating the videos yourself and downloading them. Then playing them offline. Anything else is a gamble, which may or may not be the route you want to take.

YT cracking down on videos also has a lot to do with skittish advertisers. I’m not sure if a solution is possible other than utilizing Patreon, librepay, etc. Even if you don’t make “controversial” content, that’s what most people do these days for consistency, as well as merchandise.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube by gundmc on Saturday January 26, 2019 @12:44AM (#19004977)

YouTube Kids is a separate app and it has an option to only allow human-vetted videos. From the support site:

"In this setting, your child will only be able to watch videos, channels and collections that you have hand-picked. Collections are videos and channels grouped by topics, such as science and music, picked by the YouTube Kids teams or our partners."

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube by intertextuality on Sunday January 27, 2019 @08:37AM (#19011622)

Sorry to be so cynical, but I do not trust youtube whatsoever. Do you trust random "partners" of youtube? I don't.

YT has proven themselves incapable time and time again when it comes to dealing with human support and services. I cannot read PR text from them and just believe it.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube by platzer on Friday January 25, 2019 @07:41PM (#19003947)

How about employing 10 people of this massive platform to curate some channels that people can easily subscribe to? It could literally be advertised to be kids-friendly and not dumb etc.

[ Parent | on HN ]